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With opponents on CapitolHill unable to keep President Obama from signing the controversial National Defense Authorization Act, lawmakers in Washington State are proposing a bill that would block its dangerous provisions from themselves.

Five Republican lawmakers in the state of Washington have proposed a bill that would keep the provisions that permit the president from indefinitely detaining American citizens from applying to state residents. Despite widespread opposition, President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, or NDAA, into law on December 31, 2011. In authorizing the bill, President Obama added a signing statement insisting that he would not abide by the provisions that permit the unconstitutional actions guaranteed under the law. Even with this addendum, however, critics fear that this president — and any future ones — will use the bill to break down the civil liberties of Americans.

Reps. Jason Overstreet, Matt Shea, Vincent Buys, Cary Condotta and David Taylor, all Republicans, have introduced HB 2759, or the Washington State Preservation of Liberty Act. With the bill, the lawmakers aim to tackle the NDAA provisions that make American citizens on par with al-Qaeda terrorists in terms of making anyone in the US eligible for stay at the Guantanamo Bay military prison.

The bill calls for, among other items, “To condemn in no uncertain terms,” the sections of the NDAA that authorize the president to used the armed forces to indefinitely detain Americans without charge, subject them to military tribunals and transfer citizens to a foreign country or foreign entity.

“Winning the war against terror cannot come at the great expense of eviscerating the unalienable rights recognized by and protected in the United States Constitution,” add the lawmakers.

Outside of Washington, others have agreed since before the law went into effect. ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero responded to the news of the bill’s authorization last month by saying, “President Obama’s action … is a blight on his legacy because he will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law.”

In Congress, Texas Representative Ron Paul has actually proposed a bill that will repeal those dangerous provisions from coast-to-coast. Following Monday’s GOP primary in the state of Florida, Congressman Paul used an address to supporters to voice his opposition to the NDAA.

“The purpose of all governments should be the protection of individual liberty for each and every one of us!” said Paul. “We need to reverse the trend of the attack on our civil liberties, we need to repeal the Patriot Act . . . We need to reverse the trend of the attack on our civil liberties, we need to repeal the Patriot Act . . . We need to repeal the provision that says the president can use the military to arrest any American citizen and deny them a trial!”

He brought that argument to the Washington DC last month, asking, “Is this really the kind of United States we want to create in the name of fighting terrorism?”

“I recognize how critical it is that we identify and apprehend those who are suspected of plotting attacks against Americans. But why do we have so little faith in our justice system?” asked the congressman. He proposed a bill that would repeal the detention provisions, although Congress has yet to act on it.

In the other Washington, however, lawmakers may soon vote on a localized bill that would keep The Evergreen State safe from the NDAA. If passed, the Washington State Preservation of Liberty Act will bar the U.S. military from conducting an investigation or detainment of a citizen within the state of Washington.

Last month, the US Supreme Court already evoked the NDAA by using its detention provisions to justify the continued imprisonment of an alleged terrorist, Musa’ab al-Madhwani.

Morales told reporters in Bogota on Tuesday during a regional summit in the Colombian capital that it was a question of “dignity and sovereignty”.

As a coca growers’ union leader before his 2005 election, Morales said he was “personally a victim” because US agents controlled Bolivia‘s military and police.

Bolivia’s anti-narcotics police, working closely with the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), often clashed with coca growers and Morales has said they once beat him unconscious.

“They repressed us in Bolivia. That has ended,” Morales said.

“For the first time since Bolivia was founded, the United States will now respect Bolivia’s rules and laws,” he added, under the agreement restoring full diplomatic ties that Bolivia and Washington signed on Monday.

The deal comes three years after the Andean nation’s leftist government expelled the US ambassador and DEA for allegedly inciting the opposition.

Normalising relations

The pact calls for the restoration of ambassadors as soon as possible and close co-operation in counter narcotics, trade and development, said a US official familiar with the agreement.

Morales said that he still considered the ambassador he expelled in September 2008, Philip Goldberg, to have been “a conspirator”. Less than two months later, he ejected the DEA.

Washington denies the Bolivian government’s allegations that Goldberg schemed with lowlands agribusiness people to unseat Morales, an Aymara Indian raised in the country’s poor highlands.

The 12-member super committee created to slash the federal deficit is powered by the threat that if it doesn’t come up with $1.2 trillion in savings, automatic, across-the-board cuts will be instituted to reach that same goal, with half of those cuts hitting the Pentagon.

Don’t believe it.

The supposed across-the-board cuts aren’t slated to go into effect until January 1, 2013. Put more simply: They might not ever go into effect.

The automatic cuts — known as sequestration — are often discussed in Washington as if they’re certain, an inevitability that Congress won’t be able to prevent. But on the same day those cuts would go into effect, the Bush tax rates, which President Obama extended for two years, are set to expire, leading to an “automatic” tax hike that is treated in Washington as anything but inevitable. (That the two coming policy changes are approached so differently — cuts are expected; expiring tax breaks for the wealthy are brushed aside — is a window into Washington’s priorities.)

A host of other tax cuts and credits will expire on the same day, including the alternative minimum tax, ethanol tax credits, renewable energy credits and others important to businesses, the wealthy and the middle class.

A lame duck Congress would have two months after the 2012 election to stave off the expiration of both that tax policy and the super committee’s “automatic” cuts.

The most likely scenario: The super committee locks up along partisan lines and, after the 2012 election, bipartisan negotiators deal with the tax cuts and the super committee’s sequestration cuts, along with a basket of other expiring provisions, in one set of negotiations. Democrats will be pressured by the coming sequestration, while Republicans will be motivated by the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. And all of their negotiations will take place in a political and economic climate impossible to predict today.

“All of this at some point comes together,” said Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) of the Bush tax cuts and the sequestration. “One thing about this place, the paces just keep repeating themselves.”

While many have portrayed the super committee as having some sort of automatic axe, other observers haven’t bought the idea. Stan Collender, a Democratic budget expert and consultant to Wall Street and Washington lobbyists, saw through it quickly, writing a report for Qorvis Communications downplaying the likelihood of the automatic cuts.

“There is a high probability that the super committee won’t be able to agree on a deficit reduction deal and that the across-the-board spending cuts that are supposed to be triggered if that happens will NOT go into effect as scheduled in 2013,” he wrote. “Federal budget agreements have seldom, if ever, gone the distance. Instead, they have always been changed, waived, ignored or abandoned.”